Challenge Series: Going to School Everyday

The Galileo Journalism staff recently embarked on individual challenges meant to push their boundaries and lead to improvement. Each challenge lasted between one to two weeks and was meant to evoke some self realization. Here are their stories.

For our journalism class, each one of us was challenged to come up with a resolution which we would stick to for the course of two weeks. Over the last semester I’ve had problems with oversleeping and being late or absent from class. In total, I’ve missed around 50 days of school this school year. Due to the fact that I haven’t been consistently present in all of my classes, my grades have been lackluster. This is an issue that I really wanted to work on because I have a desire to be able to graduate with decent marks. Throughout high school I’ve maintained a 3.0 GPA, so I decided that my resolution would be to go to every class on time knowing that attendance would be the way to get my grades back to normal and on track for graduation.

Things didn’t go as planned pretty quickly because the day after I decided to make this resolution for myself, I ended up oversleeping yet again and I did not go to school. Not only that, but I also missed two more days of school during this project in the same week. After falling short so soon, I didn’t know if it was worth it to keep on going or give up. I felt that maybe I should’ve decided to have a different topic or just skip writing this article all together.

There were days when I wake up to my alarm and just stare at the ceiling debating if I should get another nap in or watch some basketball instead of going to school. Whenever I felt like getting out of bed it was as if my body was glued to my bed and unable to move. In spite of all of this, I decided to persevere because I felt that this was a good challenge to follow through on. I personally believe that my education is important especially when I only have a few months of school left to get my grades back to where they are supposed to be. So after finally figuring out how many hours of sleep I needed the night before and setting multiple alarms, I didn’t miss anymore days of school.

During this challenge, I noticed that school seemed to be way longer. I also noticed that my teachers were glad to have me back in class and soon my productivity in the classroom started to increase. I started to get my homework done more often and near the end of the two week duration, the feeling of school taking forever faded and time started to go by just like normal again for me.

In conclusion, although I didn’t achieve my goal of going to class on time everyday, I did significantly increase my frequency of attendance. This in turn is raising my grades as we speak. I also learned that I need to get better rest the night before if I ever want to be able to get to school on time.